Category Archives: Hickman, Patricia

Saphora Warren has had it. Although her life looks good to outsiders–she has raised three children, she lives in a home that will soon be featured in Southern Living, and she is liked and admired in her community–Saphora’s sense of herself has been eroded by her husband’s selfishness and infidelities. Deciding that she needs time to herself, Saphora packs a bag, planning to spend some time at her family’s beach house in Oriental, North Carolina. But before Saphora can get out the door, her husband Bender comes home and announces that he has cancer. Bender wants to spend his last days at the house in Oriental, and he wants his whole family to join him there. Soon Sophora is playing nurse, hostess, mother, therapist, and match-maker to her extended family and to an assortment of people she meets in the town. It’s almost too much, but Saphora finds her inner strength and closes out one life with grace even as a new life opens up for her.